Weirdest SciTech news of the week

You might think you don't need a bracelet to alert you when something -- or someone -- is getting on your nerves, but the makers of WellBe think you do.

The wearable heart rate tracker uses your physical pulse to take your emotional pulse. When it senses that your surroundings are causing a physiological stress reaction it will give you an electronic nudge to take a deep breath or take a walk outside.

Out of this world weather

An artist's rendering of an exoplanet with cloudy mornings and clear, scorching afternoons, exhibiting a cycle of phase variations that occur as different portions of the planet are illuminated by its star, as seen from Earth. Astronomers at the University of Toronto, York University and Queen's University Belfast used measurements of the phase variations of six exoplanets obtained by the Kepler space telescope to forecast their daily weather cycle.
LISA ESTEVES/UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

The search for Earth-like planets has consumed astronomers of late, with scores being found orbiting habitable zones of distant stars. Yet little is known about the weather on these alien worlds - until now.

"Despite the discovery of thousands of extra-solar planets, what these far-off worlds look like is still shrouded in mystery," Lisa Esteves, graduate student at the University of Toronto, who led a study of 14 exoplanets that appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Tuesday.

Using sensitive observations from the Kepler space telescope, Esteves and her colleagues found conditions might an extreme version of what earthlings are used to. These planets appear to have cloudy, overcast skies in the mornings and scorching heat in the afternoons, with temperatures reaching to 1,600 degrees Celsius, or 2,912 F.

Science star meets rockstars

British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking
Discovery Channel

Stephen Hawking is a scientific superstar. Now he's going to mix with rock stars, taking the stage at the UK's Glastonbury Festival.

Organizers said Tuesday that Hawking will make a "special guest appearance" at the Kidz Field during the festival, which runs June 24-28 in southwest England. It did not give details of his performance.

Eel robot, extraterrestrial undersea explorer

This artist's rendering depicts 2015 NIAC Phase I Fellow Mason Peck's soft-robotic rover for planetary environments for missions that cannot be accomplished with conventional power systems. It resembles a squid, with tentacle-like structures that serve as electrodynamic 'power scavengers' to harvest power from locally changing magnetic fields. The goal is to enable amphibious exploration of gas-giant moons like Europa.
NASA/CORNELL UNIVERSITY/NSF

It is believed that under the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa there lies a vast subterranean ocean, and that this ocean could possibly sustain life within it. What could be more appropriate for plumbing those depths than an autonomous robot built to work -- and look -- like our own creatures of the deep?

A team of engineers from Cornell University has won a $100,000 grant from NASA to develop a squid- or lamprey-like autonomous robot that could explore the harsh and unknown conditions in Europa's subsurface ocean.

The soft, flexible marine rover would only use resources in its extraterrestrial environment to power itself through the water. Without having to rely on its own battery or other fuel source sent from Earth, or hard-to-come-by solar energy, the robot would use its electrodynamic tentacles to harvest energy from changing magnetic fields around it.

"Creepy" email app

A new app that pulls information off the Internet to improve the average email has even the creator calling the new technology "creepy." Drew D'Agostino is the man behind Crystal, something he calls the biggest thing to hit email since spellcheck.

"Crystal tells you how to communicate with anybody. And, to get that information, it detects information written by you, or about you online," D'Agostino told CBS News San Francisco's Betty Yu.

So, if you want to write an email to someone, Crystal will scour the Internet to find whatever public information is out there about that person and develop a character profile.

The app will then tell you how and what to write -- or not write -- coaching you toward an email worded specifically for someone else's communication style. On the website it explains, "When you write an email, Crystal tells you the words, phrases, style, and tone you should use to reach the recipient in the way that they like to communicate, rather than your own."

Chickens with dino noses

The image shows the non-avian dinosaur Anchiornis alongside a primitive modern bird, with snouts rendered transparent to show the premaxillary and palatine bones.
IMAGE BY JOHN CONWAY

New research, published this week in the journal Evolution, reveals you can give rise to reptilian snouts simply by inhibiting a select few genes in chickens. Knock out the beak, and a snout pops up in its place.

Paleontologist Bhart-Anjan Bhullar and his colleagues set out to understand the genetic underpinnings of the evolutionary transformation that led to dinosaur snouts turning into bird beaks. They identified a "patch of gene expression right in the middle of the face" of chicken embryos. They then "took out the patch" and incubated the eggs. The embryos developed with a snout and palate similar to their dinosaur ancestors, such as Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx.

A rare quartet of quasars

Image of the region of the space occupied by the rare quasar quartet. The four quasars are indicated by arrows. The quasars are embedded in a giant nebula of cool dense gas visible in the image as a blue haze. The nebula has an extent of one million lightyears across, and these objects are so distant that their light has taken nearly 10 billion years to reach telescopes on Earth. This false color image is based on observations with the Keck 10m telescope on the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii.
HENNAWI & ARRIGONI-BATTAIA, MPIA

A quartet of quasars has for the first time been found in close proximity, a discovery that could challenge ideas about how galaxies and galaxy clusters formed.

Believed to the nuclei of early galaxy formation, quasars are powered by the increase of matter onto a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy.

Quasars are exceedingly rare and are usually separated by hundreds of millions of light-years. The researchers estimate that the odds of discovering a quadruple quasar by chance are one in ten million.

That makes the opah (Lampris guttatus) the first warm-blooded fish ever discovered. Most fish are exotherms, meaning they require heat from the environment to stay toasty. The opah, as an endotherm, keeps its own temperature elevated even as it dives to chilly depths of 1,300 feet in temperate and tropical oceans around the world. It does this by constantly flapping its fins and with the help of its unique gills.